Tag Archives: Alfonso Cuaron

Fripp & Eno started it with The Heavenly Music Corporation, not ambient music but ominous and terrifying sonic explorations, lovely too. (Click preceding link to listen.)I heard the sound again, years later, at a Grateful Dead show in Miami in 1988; it was like being inside a jet engine, all-encompassing, so very loud.

And then, in Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (2006), a new version, low and distant, perhaps over-produced, arrived on screen. (Click preceding link to listen.)It arose again in the trailer for Chris Nolan’s Inception(2010), promising aural profundity; regrettably, the sound was brief and the movie was not.The sound became more realized in Gravity (2013), providing the soundscape for the impending doom of debris.It has now returned to the frontier of music, more than My Bloody Valentine’s sonic wall, in Sigur Ros’ latest work, Kveikur (2013).Louder and deeper, back-filled by drums and wailing voices, the sound builds, just falling short of the next plateau. As this sound continues in its evolution, getting deeper and fuller, it might even be a synchronistic backdrop for our promised apocalypse.

There are moments in Gravity that are worth something – although I’m not sure if it’s worth the $100 million budget nor the $18 ticket. The visuals are impressive, like the camerawork and music; however the narrative is superficial at best, offering only caricatures and predictable cliffhangers, as it jumps from one space station to another, with a cloud of space debris always in close pursuit. It’s a shame, with all that money, time and ingenuity, that such little effort was invested into fleshing out the details of why we are supposed to care.